I’m sure I’ve sad it elsewhere, but I think these discussions often get bogged down by edge cases those are not particularly helpful, IMO.
The captive/cultivated or wild/not wild part of the DQA is there to separate the vast majority of observations that can clearly be marked one way or the other, and I think it works fine for that. Yes, not something new users will see or understand, but to me that’s an onboarding issue, plus just a general issue that most people don’t make the distinction, it’s all just “nature”.
It helps anyone use iNaturalist to see where species occur in the “wild”, it helps those of us who don’t want to see observations of garden plants or pets to avoid them, and it helps those who want to see them find them. If there are outliers, those can still be surfaced by anyone looking at maps or data exports and the community can discuss it.
If there are questionable situations, go by the definition provided:
Checking captive / cultivated means that the observation is of an organism that exists in the time and place it was observed because humans intended it to be then and there. Likewise, wild / naturalized organisms exist in particular times and places because they intended to do so (or because of intention of another wild organism).
And, as @kestrel and @rebeccafay say when training for City Nature Challenge, use your best judgement if it’s not totally clear. State your reasoning and discuss in a civil manner.You might convince others, or you might not.
Regarding splitting captive/cultivated - my preference would be to present Wild: yes/no when creating new observations, but that presents its own problems, meaning that on Android and the web, the checkbox would be filled by default and you would have to un-check it if it’s not wild, which is not great UI (at least to me and some other staff members).
Finally, annotations are not linked to data quality, so I didn’t approve the request to make annotations for these terms.